An awkward exploration of contemporary multiculturalism.
Odhiambo's (The Reverend's Apprentice, 2008) new novel explores life in a vaguely located Canadian resort town on the Pacific coast called Ogweyo Cove.
A German-Canadian journalist named Kerstin Ostheim is preparing to marry P.J. Banner, a photographer who is torn between the worlds of his white father and his Indigenous mother. Meanwhile, Kerstin's trans daughter, Schuld, struggles with society's prejudice against her identity. She has two comforts—her art and her boyfriend, Woloff, a Kenyan Olympic athlete who is trying to regain his confidence after his career has come to a premature end. Further afield, Kerstin's father is running for another term as governor (of what, we are never told), while P.J.'s father succumbs to health problems triggered by his stressful business dealings. This novel is told in a clumsy present tense, with prose that sometimes borders on nonsensical ("Sirens bray down wind between the present and future perfect, and out of place in the sensible order of things they hate for real"). Readers may detect a faint plot regarding a spate of mysterious horse killings that Kerstin and P.J. decide to investigate, but it is perfunctory at best; the novel never seems very interested in solving that mystery. Mostly, Odhiambo cycles between characters, presenting episodes from their pasts while neglecting to investigate how these episodes inform the complexity of their relationships in the present. Despite the present tense, few events feel urgent or weighty, so that most of the narrative proceeds in an abstracted haze. When Woloff and Schuld are assailed in a supermarket by an angry man, for instance, the story seems to be building toward some kind of crisis, but it's a false alarm; the happy couple merely sidesteps the aggressor and goes back to Woloff's house to "get lit." The same sense of abstraction plagues the setting: Place names and cultural references are maddeningly unspecific, making it difficult for readers to feel absorbed in the story. This novel wants to wrestle with heavy issues of identity, history, and the legacy of European colonialism, but its vague setting, ill-defined cultural references, and psychologically flat characters render these insights flimsy.
An awkward exploration of contemporary multiculturalism.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77166-423-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Bookthug
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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